What is Photo Mechanic?
Photo Mechanic is a software application designed specifically for professional photographers to enhance and accelerate their digital workflow. First released in 2001 by Camera Bits, Inc., Photo Mechanic aims to provide a fast, flexible, and powerful browsing, culling, and metadata tool for working with digital image files.
Some key features of Photo Mechanic include:
- Very fast rendering and browsing of RAW, JPEG, and video files
- Powerful culling tools like star ratings, color labels, and filtering to quickly select the best images
- Advanced EXIF, IPTC, and XMP metadata editing tools
- Support for tethered shooting with instant display and metadata sync
- Sidecar XMP support for non-destructive metadata edits
- Integrates with major digital asset managers like Adobe Lightroom
- API and plugins allow automation and custom workflows
- Available for Mac and Windows
If you deal with thousands of images from a shoot, Photo Mechanic aims to provide the speed, culling power, and metadata tools to facilitate your post-processing workflow. The emphasis is on keeping the software responsive when working with many large image files at once. For more selective editing of images, most users would switch to Lightroom or other photo editing programs after initial culling in Photo Mechanic.
Adobe Lightroom, FastStone Image Viewer, IrfanView, PhotoPrism, darktable, digiKam, Photoscape, XnView, XnView MP, nomacs, IMATCH, FilterPixel, ApolloOne, Pixave, Aftershoot, JPEGView are some alternatives to Photo Mechanic.